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Thursday, July 5, 2012

Building and packaging the latest Gearman server in CentOS 6.2

This is a how to package, install and test the latest version of Gearman server in RPM format using CentOS 6.2.

Motivation

The latest version available of Gearman in the Fedora repository is very outdated, CentOS is even more. So, if you plan to use the latest Gearman features, you have two choices 1) compile it using the tarball; 2) package it (hence compile it) in RPM format.
This guide uses the second approach, but not from scratch. Instead using the latest available SRPM German's package and performing some minor changes.

At this moment, the latest Gearman version is 0.33 and the latest Fedora-based SRPM is 0.23.

Hands on bash

Append EPEL repository by creating the file /etc/yum.repos.d/epel.repo with the following content:

Now the trick. The sed command below performs some changes on gearmand.spec file: 1) replaces the old version number with the new one; 2) Comments dependencies from systemd packages not available yet on CentOS; and 3) Adds various file/directory entries only available on the latest version of Gearman.